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Gigabyte GeForce 8800 GTS Review

What Was that Name Again?

by Josh Walrath

            Texture filtering now is nearly angle independent with the 8800 series, and steps away from the “brilinear” filtering between the mipmap levels that was less performance intensive and was used for earlier generations of products from both ATI and NVIDIA.  Both Quality and High Quality texture filtering in the control panel enable angle-independent trilinear filtering, as well as the increasing levels of anisotropy.  Basically it cleans up the image in 3D applications to a great degree.  In games such as World of Warcraft, with large areas of repeating textures, the high quality filtering smooths everything out without blurring the textures.  Scenes using HQ filtering with 16X anisotropy are about as pristine as one can get.  The G80 now takes the crown for texture filtering quality away from the Radeon X1x00 series of cards, as it is a small jump ahead when it comes to angle independent filtering.

The foam around the card is thick, and simply does not budge much (but does absorb shock quite nicely).

            On the anti-aliasing side NVIDIA has gone to great pains to improve their multi-sample unit.  First of all it can now apply AA to HDR operations.  Not only can it do this with FP16 ops, but also the yet unutilized FP32 operations.  With the G80 NVIDIA has released the first FP32 HDR support in the industry for desktop graphics.  It also introduces a new concept with CSAA.  Coverage Sample AA is something of a confusing concept, but one that when explained makes a lot of sense.  Basically standard anti-aliasing takes color, geometry, and texture samples for points within a single pixel’s area, and then averages those values into a single pixel color.  When CSAA is enabled, it basically increases the coverage sampling values without increasing the color, texture, and geometry samples.  This allows more work to be done on a pixel’s final output without increasing the sampling rate (and decreases memory bandwidth utilization).  It essentially is more of a weighted average of a pixel’s color based on more values taken from the samples used in 4X MSAA.  In the following table we can see how many color and Z samples are needed to perform MSAA on modern units.

            In this handy table we can see how the workload is spread out through the different AA modes.  16XQ is the most hardcore, and it takes the biggest performance penalty.  Because of its smaller memory footprint and stored samples, 16X theoretically approaches 4X performance but with quality approaching 16XQ.  With these new AA modes, NVIDIA has been able to drop the mixed supersampling modes.  The new units are also now able to apply AA to stencil shadows, but it is limited to 4X because CSAA is not supported in the stencil buffer.

            The ROPS that the 8800 features are really now SuperROPS in their ability to render HDR and AA.  The texturing units are also incredibly beefy and can do a massive amount of work per clock.  These two things together give the GeForce 8800 series of cards the absolute best image quality available today.  I simply cannot go back to the 7900 series of cards after using the 8800 GTS.

            The CUDA support means that the graphics processor can be used for other generalized computing tasks, and NVIDIA is working with folks like Folding@Home to create applications which will utilize the GPU.  So far there are no standalone programs I am aware of that will support the G80 in this manner, but NVIDIA has a fine history of working with 3^rd party developers to enable new features on their products. 

The Bundle

            The bundle included with this card is fairly basic.  It does offer a nice game for the US crowd (Civilization 4) and a slightly more interesting one for the International folks (Call of Juarez).  I am not sure why Civ 4 was decided on for the US, but it is a very fun game that has some nice 3D effects.  And like the other Civilization games, people can play this over and over again for hours on end.  Just ask my wife.

The bundle and card in all its glory.  I think I see a recurring theme in the artwork though.

            It also includes two DVI to VGA adapters, one HDTV breakout box, and the 4 pin molex to PCI-E power connector.  It comes with a manual in several languages detailing how it should be installed.  It also includes the requisite driver CD with some fairly old drivers included (ver. 96.89).  It also has the Yahoo Toolbar that you can install as well.  It does not feature any overclocking or flashing utilities, so for the majority of users that have downloaded the latest driver versions, the install CD is a coaster.  The DirectX 9.0c version included with the CD is from July 2004, so it is not a very recent redistributable.  Again, users would be better off downloading the latest version.

Next:  The Card

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